Paper trading is not for me, I can never get serious about it, I can only learn from live trading. I won't stop trading, if I stopped, that's it. Now I have the passion to learn, to trade, I love it. I force myself to stop it to save possible loss? That's just silly, very silly. If at the end of the day I blow up my account, will I regret not to trade demo? Absolutely not.
The fact that you can't get serious about paper trading is very telling. You're not serious enough and you won't make it. Passion to learn? You won't learn anything from sitting in front of the screens losing for 6 1/2 hours day after day. It's not about paper trading for months. Paper trading is just for testing your methodology (which you don't have one yet). It can be done in a week or two. Then, when your methodology is proven succesful in demo, you go live. Trading is a business and you need to be very, very serious about it. When you've lost all your money, please remember that you were warned.
OP. Keep the cash you have and learn to swing trade on demo or for microstakes. This way you can work a job. You are gambling with no edge. GL
I'm anti-paper trading too. Paper/sim trading and real money trading are completely different worlds. Many people will crumble in a real battlefield, but may act confident and comfortable, even cocky, in a sim account. You should watch: Traders Millions By The Minute Season 1 Episode 2 In particular the part about Jane....she grew her sim account by a large amount -- but failed in real life.
I learn very little from my losing trades, but learn much from profitable trades. Sometimes some of the losing trades could have been avoided altogether, I have learned that taking way too many signals and often 2 of them were taken into Support/Resistance of some kind, whether trendline S/R or levels or "touches" of an area(they don't have to be exact-can be few ticks difference for one minute or point for five minute), Head & Shoulders patterns as right shoulder setting up. Megaphone patterns are hard on breakout entries with trend. Careful around triangles, Diamonds, channels, multiple Doji's, Batman pattern, rounding bottoms/tops, sped of market, reports, failed patterns. And all these patterns can help as they could be screaming to take profit early. Losing trades lose and be happy you take the loss, if you risking 2 points, that is what you will lose. Look at losses this way, you stay within the walls of risk but you go crazy and fly out and really get hurt.
Taking 17 trades in a day is a lot if activity. I won't presume to tell you what you should be doing, but I will say that the popular view of a trader making snap decisions in a frantic environment is fictional at best. Every time a trader takes on risk it should be as a result of careful planning and preparation. Learning to trade doesn't happen by making trades. Learning happens when there is no emotional involvement in the outcome. Making trades can help teach emotional control and discipline (or instil bad habits when rules are broken but a profit is made), but this is a concern for a time after a plan is in place. Something that I find helpful is to review my daily trades after the close. Were all of my trades in accordance with my plan? Did I intentionally or unintentionally ignore the plan at anytime? How/why did I ignore the plan (sometimes I just screw up and make a mistake...what the hell was I thinking)? I have even went so far as to "punish" myself for not following my plan. If I do not trade correctly today (win or lose, follow the plan), I will not be allowed to place a single trade tomorrow. Forcing myself to sit and watch without placing any trades was an important lesson for me...there is no reason to fear missing a trade, another (probably better one) will be along soon. There was no worse feeling for me than busting my ass all day, making trade after trade (mostly without a plan), then realizing that a relaxing day with 2 or 3 trades would have been better for my bottom line and my health. Good luck to you.
Looking at your most recent stats, its pretty obvious what is happening. You're risking far too much for too little gain. Take just this day, and do this. Make a spreadsheet to follow each trade and see what would happen with different risk to reward ratios. For example, pretend that you had a stop at 4 ticks, and a profit at 4 ticks, which one hits first? Then do the same thing with a stop at 8 ticks, or profit at 8 ticks. Make sure for the profit targets that price actually trades through the level so you don't have issues with getting filled. Try one also with a 12 tick profit, and 8 tick stop, or whatever combination you can think of. Basically, what you want to see is, would keeping some sort of consistent stop and target lead to you being profitable today. I know there are a whole bunch of people who will say that you should be letting the market tell you when to get out and stuff like that, but at this stage, you're not ready for this type of precise market reading, and you will probably be more wrong than right anyway. I have done this very same thing in the past, and here is a sample of the results. Keep in mind that there aren't stats for a certain type of setup, and they aren't even categorized in terms of type of day. This is simply an analysis to figure out if micro managing trades is leading to better outcomes over a series of trades or not. You see, looking at your many trades, I would bet that applying a consistent stop and target will more than likely increase your profits for a certain combination. You can see in my own stats that using an 8 tick stop and 12 tick profit leads profitable results, whereas many of the other combinations do not. This is a spreadsheet that I setup wihich calculated all columns with simple formulas, and I just enter a "1" for each combination of risk and reward for that trade. At the bottom, you even see a row that for those trades that hit at least +8, if I moved the stop to 0, and let it either hit +12 ticks or stop out at 0, this would have even increased the profits, and this was for the most profitable combination of -8/+12. I think the only way to get out of the rut is with stats, to prove to yourself that it can be done. You may actually already have very good entries. Maybe you're even better than some traders here with where you place your trades, but your trade management could be what is holding you back. On some levels, this trading business is just a stats game, so you gotta gets stats working for you, not against you. Making a one tick profit, when you're risking much more, based on your losses, is not stats working for you. I do wonder how many of those trades where you took one tick profit ended up hitting a 2 or 3 point target before hitting perhaps a 2 point stop. As you also do this, you see how many losers you can hit in a row, but at the same time, look at how none of this matters to the bottom line if you're consistent. Doing this was a real eye opener for me, and if you'd like to do this and share, I'd love to see your results. I understand how you don't want to stop trading, and I understand how SIM trading just doesn't feel the same, but at the very least, you need to figure out where the problem is, and doing some stats like this will I think bring this to light.
In terms of active trading, if you get bored or can't attentively trade a demo account, it's going to be hard to make it long term IMO. Needing the thrill/fear of real money is a recipe for disaster. It's like saying you can only box in a sanctioned match and its too boring with no adrenaline to train/spar. You should be able to train with a demo account to recognize opportunity and respond with muscle memory like reactions. You will want well ingrained confidence to avoid emotional trading now and if/when you begin to increase size. Trading should be almost boring, with no one trade making or breaking your day/week/month/year/career.
If you can never get serious with paper trading then you are not ready to learn. From what you said, They sound very much like you are gambling. You are addicted to gambling. You are now trying to lie to yourself that you are not gambling by trading and not going to casinos. Many of us here tried to advise you but you did not take their advises. No point advising him anymore because he is probably an addicted gambler who is finding another alternative than casino to lose his money.
To the OP: I highly doubt there's a private retail trader anywhere in the world that is able to make $2500 a month trading the ES with a $12k account. You probably would be the first. Like others said before, you can save yourself a lot of pain and disappointment by walking away from this now. Get a job, if you don't have any professional qualifications get a college degree or learn a trade, that is highly in demand. If you must have a go at trading, learn to code and focus on developing an edge in the stock market